


the blonde doll smiling behind us

by scarecrowes



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: Implied Character Death, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:14:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarecrowes/pseuds/scarecrowes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Tuesday morning, New York Times, you passed away, you lost your mind."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the blonde doll smiling behind us

**Author's Note:**

> 1928; a fill from the Doomed Ships Ficathon.

The only time Charlie kisses her, she slaps him across the face.   
  
It's as sudden as he was, and as ill timed; he'd caught her wrist as she opened the office door to go back in, Meyer left shuffling from foot to foot outside like they shouldn't be the ones here to collect Arnold's books. Like sending Charlie inside instead was a favor, and not something that left her faltering and sick somewhere deep in her bones.   
  
 _He's something else, isn’t he?_  That was what Arnold had said, though it's not that she thinks of when Charlie regains himself, blinking away the sting of her handprint on his cheek. His fingers are still a vice around her wrist, as much to keep her in the doorway as keep him  _here._  
  
She knows lonely when she sees it.   
  
But she’s never been a girl, not for him, and the time for that is behind them anyway. Without even her husband's bedside to sit at in the hospital anymore, she can just pretend she doesn't know about the nurses' lined pockets and Charlie's vigil from the very last night. It's old news, cold and quiet, a distant set of steps away from when she'd found Charlie asleep in the dark on her side of their marriage bed.   
  
And they were never  _that_.   
  
“Let go.” It’s a demand, not a question - never that, not for years. She’s half waiting for him to hit back, all the junkyard dog she knows he is somewhere underneath - but his grip slips loose, and he steps away.   
  
Her wrist aches, but nothing was enough to bruise it, and Carolyn stands a little straighter for that. There was a point - one night, nothing more, when she’d come back from London and found him hovering in Arnold’s office with his shirt buttons undone, knuckles split and lip bleeding. And then, it was Arnold’s turn to find  _her_ , if only because she’d found the iodine in the bathroom first, and Charlie avoided her eyes like she wouldn’t notice him staring anyway.   
  
“If that’s everything...” She nods, the clip of her heels on the floor the only noise for moments as she steps back through the door. He won’t be the only one she never writes about, the one who never left her with bruises or any bigger injury than touching her tongue to her lips and finding the taste of cigarettes that aren’t hers. She’s never loved him - but they own something of each other’s, enough that he could dare to pull her close in a doorway, with the husband she’d abandoned barely cold.   
  
“I’ll see you later, Mrs. Rothstein.” And there’s the boy she knew under that somewhere, because for all his cold bravado and how something turns  _off_ , she knows that he still has a tie printed in horseshoes, like the ring she doesn’t wear, anymore.   
  
“Goodbye, Charlie.”    
  
She’d learned to use a man’s name against him years ago.


End file.
